"We didn't truly know the dangers of the market, because it was a dark market," says Brooksley Born, the head of an obscure federal regulatory agency -- the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) -- who not only warned of the potential for economic meltdown in the late 1990s, but also tried to convince the country's key economic powerbrokers to take actions that could have helped avert the crisis. "They were totally opposed to it," Born says. "That puzzled me. What was it that was in this market that had to be hidden?"

In The Warning, airing Tuesday, Oct. 20, 2009, at 9 P.M. ET on PBS (check local listings), veteran FRONTLINE producer Michael Kirk (Inside the Meltdown, Breaking the Bank) unearths the hidden history of the nation's worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. At the center of it all he finds Brooksley Born, who speaks for the first time on television about her failed campaign to regulate the secretive, multitrillion-dollar derivatives market whose crash helped trigger the financial collapse in the fall of 2008.

"I didn't know Brooksley Born," says former SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt, a member of President Clinton's powerful Working Group on Financial Markets. "I was told that she was irascible, difficult, stubborn, unreasonable." Levitt explains how the other principals of the Working Group -- former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan and former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin -- convinced him that Born's attempt to regulate the risky derivatives market could lead to financial turmoil, a conclusion he now believes was "clearly a mistake."

Born's battle behind closed doors was epic, Kirk finds. The members of the President's Working Group vehemently opposed regulation -- especially when proposed by a Washington outsider like Born.

"I walk into Brooksley's office one day; the blood has drained from her face," says Michael Greenberger, a former top official at the CFTC who worked closely with Born. "She's hanging up the telephone; she says to me: 'That was [former Assistant Treasury Secretary] Larry Summers. He says, "You're going to cause the worst financial crisis since the end of World War II."... [He says he has] 13 bankers in his office who informed him of this. Stop, right away. No more.'"

Greenspan, Rubin and Summers ultimately prevailed on Congress to stop Born and limit future regulation of derivatives. "Born faced a formidable struggle pushing for regulation at a time when the stock market was booming," Kirk says. "Alan Greenspan was the maestro, and both parties in Washington were united in a belief that the markets would take care of themselves."

Now, with many of the same men who shut down Born in key positions in the Obama administration, The Warning reveals the complicated politics that led to this crisis and what it may say about current attempts to prevent the next one.

"It'll happen again if we don't take the appropriate steps," Born warns. "There will be significant financial downturns and disasters attributed to this regulatory gap over and over until we learn from experience."

The Warning is a FRONTLINE co-production with Kirk Documentary Group. The writer and director is Michael Kirk. The producers are Michael Kirk, Jim Gilmore and Mike Wiser. The reporter is Jim Gilmore. FRONTLINE is produced by WGBH Boston and is broadcast nationwide on PBS. Funding for FRONTLINE is provided through the support of PBS viewers. Major funding for FRONTLINE is provided by The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Additional funding is provided by the Park Foundation. FRONTLINE is closed-captioned for deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers and described for people who are blind or visually impaired by the Media Access Group at WGBH. FRONTLINE is a registered trademark of the WGBH Educational Foundation. The executive producer of FRONTLINE is David Fanning.

Precisely that partisan reaction will get us into the next crisis.
The Chamber of Commerce is right now engaged to opposing regulations coming down in response to this crisis. Their attitude continues to be, when it comes to regulation, in the immortal words of Groucho Marx, "Whatever it is, I'm against it."
But in finance, you need to tie these guys down and keep 'em tied down. Then you need to divide them up into much smaller banks, and keep them divided with very strong barriers to growth (a thing no one in Washington is contemplating, of course). Otherwise, this whole thing will come down on us again.

Aye Yo: Actually, no. You're right about that.
You've got a lull right now. Money markets are working again, LIBOR is down to normal.
The problem is we now have even bigger banks that are too big to fail. No one is thinking about how to break them up and keep them broken up. Part of the reason why is that everyone is back in their partisan trenches again. The other part is that the folks in the Obama Admin's Treasury are mostly the same folks who got us into this mess, and the last and by far the most important part is that Obama blew it big time by not tackling the banks on Day One, killing the zombies, breaking up the rest of the big ones, and resetting the whole thing.
So, something bad happening again once everyone figures we are out of the woods is baked in the cake.
But getting back to Arnie, it still doesn't help that the very first reaction is partisan and political. I'm sure that's what's happening in DC too. Doesn't give me a lot of hope.

No one in Washington is contemplating this because the seats in Washington are occupied or paid for by the bankers. The US Banking Cartel is going to destroy this country.

Quote from trefoil:

Precisely that partisan reaction will get us into the next crisis.
The Chamber of Commerce is right now engaged to opposing regulations coming down in response to this crisis. Their attitude continues to be, when it comes to regulation, in the immortal words of Groucho Marx, "Whatever it is, I'm against it."
But in finance, you need to tie these guys down and keep 'em tied down. Then you need to divide them up into much smaller banks, and keep them divided with very strong barriers to growth (a thing no one in Washington is contemplating, of course). Otherwise, this whole thing will come down on us again.